Read Online The Life and Times of Benny Alvarez by Peter Johnson - Free Book Online Page A

I was helping all those people so I’d be famous? What if I hated them all? Isn’t the feeling behind something important? Maybe Morse hated creating the telegraph. Maybe he invented it to make money. Maybe he was laughing his head off as he watched people tapping away like a bunch of idiots.”
    Silence again. Then Claudine said, “Well, if Samuel Morse was such a great painter, why didn’t anyone else mention it in their reports?”
    I wanted to say, “Because everyone got their two paragraphs done, then didn’t read the rest of the entry in the encyclopedia,” but it was clear the class was liking this confrontation, so I didn’t want to push them toward Claudine’s side.
    Rather than play her game, I pulled out a sheet of other facts on Morse’s painting that I didn’t have space to include. “Did you know,” I said, “that the famous painter Washington Allston liked Morse’s paintings so much, he took him to England, where Morse studied and was so good he was admitted to the Royal Academy?” And then I read from my notes. “‘And there Morse studied the paintings of Michelangelo and created his masterpiece Dying Hercules .’” To be honest, I had never seen the painting and didn’t really know how significant it was to be admitted to the Royal Academy, but all those facts seemed to stun Claudine, as if she had lunged forward with her sword and I had disarmed her. But she recovered enough to save face, saying, “Honestly, Benny, you didn’t give those facts in your report. Now I may have to reconsider. The telegraph was Morse’s most important contribution, but maybe his paintings were equally as important.”
    Too late, Claudine, I thought, and I was about to go for the jugular when Ms. Bright came to her rescue, saying, “It’s clear we’ve learned two things today: First, great people are often multitalented; second, two different views on those people can be equally correct.” Had she gone over to the Dark Side too?
    What’s important is that after that day, I became a legend with the boys. I had stood up for every guy who had been turned into a donkey by Claudine. But I had also alienated her until death do us part. The difference was that now she had to be on top of her game, because instead of feeling sick to my stomach every time I spoke in class, I thought, Bring it on, girl .
    Now all I have to do is stop blushing when she talks to me.

Ostriches and Pigeons
    T hursday afternoons I go to my grandfather’s house and we work on language. It’s something he looks forward to. That and watching sports on TV. Crash used to come, until he freaked out and I found him in the kitchen crying. I was doing opposites with my grandfather, where I say a word, show him its picture, then ask him to say the opposite. It’s something any first grader can do, but after the stroke it would’ve been easier for my grandfather to slip on a pair of ballet shoes and walk on a tightrope across the gorge at Niagara Falls with a four-hundred-pound gorilla on his back.
    That day he was doing okay, but after about the tenth opposite, I saw him struggling. When this happens, as tough as he is, he looks like he’s about five years old. He becomes very frustrated and sad, and I wish I could open his skull and repair the connections that got messed up.
    Because he was struggling, I shifted to another word exercise, but he was spent by then, and he got emotional, holding Crash’s hand and slowly rubbing it, saying what a good boy he was. His PT Boat hat was turned a bit sideways, so Crash straightened it, and when he did, my grandfather’s eyes welled up. Crash kind of lost it and ran into the kitchen. My grandfather looked a little perplexed, but I distracted him by talking about the Patriots, which always works.
    Today, though, is going well. We start naming things around the house: a sugar bowl,